Where the hell have you been?

Stitch marker commentary provided by Knitifacts

Honestly, the first thing that popped into my mind for this post title was “Back in the Dye Life Again”. But then I realized I would be quoting Steve Winwood and I am way too freakin’ young to be that much of a fogey. So instead I went with profanity, that and beer are always a good choice!

But we have a question at hand – where in the hell have I been? It’s been almost 2 years since I updated this blog, DOH! Well, I really have no excuse for the first half of 2012. I dyed a lot of yarn, did a lot of shows in California, and was just generally pretty busy with yarn. Until the summer, when a friend called and I decided to change my entire life all at once. The short version is that he asked me, “Hey, wanna join my startup?” and I said “Hmmm….OK!”

That really is quite the oversimplification, though. It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made in my life. I really, really, REALLY loved living in San Luis Obispo. It was the first place I felt I had a community and a home. It was small enough to make me feel like I knew everyone, but big enough to be interesting. And there were hills without houses that you could see from everywhere around town. And the weather was nice. And the rent was cheap. (Though I didn’t appreciate that until I moved to Mountain View! Holy Shitballs is rent expensive in the Bay!) Anyway, I was Happy. I wasn’t making any money (newsflash: it’s incredibly hard to make dyeing yarn pay the bills, much less pay for anything else), but I loved my life. Honestly and truly.

And then this asshole from college calls me up and has to ruin everything. :) I kid, but that’s a little how I felt. A smidge angry at having to make a really hard decision. Risk my happy life to do something new and uncertain, or risk staying where I was and bypassing a unique opportunity that had the potential to be awesome. What it came down to was one simple thing: if I said no, I would always wonder. And that I just couldn’t handle. I knew I would always ask myself “What if…?”

It’s true that we fear change. I feared it a lot. But fearing something kind of makes me angry. It kind of makes me committed to overcoming that fear. So I said fuck that, I’m lookin’ you straight in the eye, Change. Come and get me.

And ohhhhhhh, it did with a vengeance. New job, new location, and new boyfriend all within a month. It was crazy, really really crazy. Crazy fun, crazy exciting, crazy exhilarating! Crazy exhausting too. I don’t even know where the rest of 2012 went, I blinked and it was 2013. Actually, I pretty much blinked and it was summer. Work consumed every ounce of energy I had. I became a hermit, I didn’t visit with new Bay Area friends, I hardly kept in touch with old SLO friends, I didn’t make any new friends. I’m pretty introverted at my core, and at the end of every day, I had no energy for interacting with people. I barely had energy to make a pizza or a salad, and sit in front of the TV and watch something really really stupid that didn’t take any brain power (oh CSI, thank you for a year of brain-dead zoning out).

I found that I missed making stuff. This was the first job that was 100% management, where I never created anything physical. Well, it turns out that I have no sense of accomplishment or fulfillment when I’m not either: A) making a physical thing, or B) making a physical thing go. I also found that I really like driving the bus. I’ve always worked in small companies, and the great thing about small companies is that you have a bigger impact on projects and the company itself. But after 3 years of being my own boss and having my own (albeit one-person) company….well let’s just say that I like being the boss. I like making the decision of what direction to move in, I like doing what I think is right.

The other thing I really missed was lifestyle. Working for myself, I could go grocery shopping in the middle of day when the stores were quiet, and then work until 9pm at night. I had almost completely merged life and work. I had no concept of weekend and weekday anymore, I did personal stuff and business stuff all day every day. I know that’s probably not for everyone, but it totally worked for me. I rarely got burnt out, and for the first time in my life, I didn’t feel like personal tasks were these awful chores that took away from my preciously hoarded free time. (Well, except for laundry. Laundry is always a chore.) When I went back to a “normal” workday, I hated it. I also missed SLO something fierce. The Bay is big and busy, and doesn’t fit me well.

After a year, it simply became time to move on. I needed personal fulfillment again. I needed to do technical work BADLY, I felt my brain was rotting from pushing Google documents around and going to meetings all day. There was a good stopping point for my job in late September, just after we delivered the first new unit to a paying customer, and the next phase would be mostly planning. So, I stopped. And promptly moved in with my boyfriend, because after the previous year, one huge change just wasn’t enough. ;)

So here I am! I’m in Redwood City now, even though my website still says that I’m in San Luis Obispo. I haven’t really had the time – no – I haven’t really had the heart to change it. And it doesn’t lie – all that yarn was absolutely dyed in San Luis Obispo. I haven’t dyed a single thing since moving up here over a year ago. LAME!

But that’s all going to change, right about now. The house we’re in has a huge backyard with a gazebo which just screams DYE YARN UNDER ME NAO! I just finished an inventory of my dye shop (OK, so it’s currently a storage unit) and I have a fair amount of undyed yarn and natural dyes. So my current mission is Wrap-Up and Re-Evaluate. Stay tuned for more relevant info about that mission. I swear, I SOLEMNLY SWEAR I WILL WRITE IN MY BLOG REGULARLY.

I know what you’re wondering. Gee, it sounds like you weren’t real happy, do you regret your decision? I can honestly say NO. No, I don’t regret my decision one bit. What I would have regretted until my dying (no “e” for once) breath, was never having tried.